Role/Job Title: Integration Architect Work Location: Norwich (2 to 3 days a week) Duration of Assignment: 6 Months The Role The Integration Architect is responsible for designing, governing, and delivering enterprise scale integration solutions across distributed systems. This role requires deep expertise in event driven architecture (EDA), real time streaming, and cloud native integration patterns using Kafka and AWS messaging/streaming services such as EventBridge, SQS, SNS, Kinesis. The Integration Architect partners with engineering, product, and cloud teams to create scalable, secure, and resilient integration landscapes. Your Responsibilities:

• Define enterprise integration architecture using event driven, microservices, and real time streaming patterns.
• Architect solutions using Kafka, AWS EventBridge, SQS/SNS, Kinesis Streams/Firehose, and Kafka Connect.
• Establish integration standards, best practices, reusable frameworks, and governance models.
• Design solutions that ensure high availability, scalability, observability, and security.
• Evaluate system integration options and recommend optimal patterns (Pub/Sub, CQRS, event sourcing, streaming analytics, request-response APIs, batch).
• Lead the end to end delivery of integration platforms and streaming pipelines.
• Define event schemas, streaming topologies, routing logic, partitions, consumer groups, and throughput targets.
• Guide development teams in building producers, consumers, connectors, and stream processing applications.
• Review designs/code to ensure alignment with architecture guidelines.

Architect integration workloads using:

• AWS Kinesis Streams & Kinesis Firehose
• AWS EventBridge event bus
• SQS/SNS for messaging patterns
• Kafka clusters (Confluent, MSK, or open-source)
• Work closely with cloud engineering teams on infrastructure design, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), performance tuning, and cost optimization.
• Implement monitoring using CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.

Enforce integration security practices:

• Authentication/Authorization
• IAM policies
• Encryption at rest/in transit
• Data governance & lineage
• Ensure solutions meet RPO, RTO, resiliency, disaster recovery, and failover requirements.
• Establish observability using tracing, logging, alerting, and dashboards.
• Collaborate with product owners, domain architects, delivery managers, and business stakeholders.
• Translate business requirements into scalable integration architectures.
• Provide technical leadership across teams and mentor integration engineers.

Your Profile Essential skills/knowledge/experience: Strong hands on experience with Kafka:

• Topics, partitions, consumer groups
• Kafka Streams, ksqlDB
• Schema Registry & Avro/JSON/Protobuf
• Kafka Connect connectors

Deep expertise in AWS streaming & messaging:

• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Firehose
• EventBridge (rules, event buses, routing)
• SQS/SNS with dead letter queues
• AWS Lambda event-based integrations
• Experience designing event-driven and microservices architectures.

Strong knowledge of:

• API integration patterns (REST, GraphQL)
• ETL/ELT and data pipelines
• Distributed system design
• High throughput and low-latency data streaming
• Good understanding of Java/Python/Node.js for integration logic.
• Familiarity with containerization & orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Working knowledge of CI/CD, DevOps, IaC.
• Architectural thinking with strong problem-solving abilities.
• Ability to lead teams, mentor developers, and influence decisions.
• Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Experience working in Agile environments.